This free website's biggest source of support is when you use any of these links to approved sources when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. If you care about the environment, never buy retail; the mailman and UPS truck passes your house everyday whether it has deliveries for you or not. If you care about yourself, your friends and your family, you need to get your own Geiger counter. Thanks! Ken.

When I was unable to find any published real-time data for California radiation levels during the Japanese meltdown in March 2011, I bought my own Geiger Counter to take my own readings and protect my family, especially if we needed to evacuate to Nevada.

Once I had this data, I realized that everyone else in California was curious, too, so I publish the levels here. I've wanted a Geiger counter for years, so the Japanese meltdowns were the perfect excuse. (Unlike us Americans, the Japanese have live data for their entire country readily available in a legible format.)

If you care about yourself, your friends and your family, you need to get your own Geiger counter as I did. Isn't your family worth it? Don't wait for the next disaster; when Japan melted down, they were sold out for a year about an hour after I got mine. I care about my family and my environment; don't you? You can get one for the price of a tank of gas, and my detector is still running today on the same battery that came with it three years ago. As all of us in science know, you have to measure it yourself if you want to trust the readings.

CPM is Clicks Per Minute on my SPER Scientific 840007 Radiation Detector. I measure for one minute and count the clicks. Every kind of detector records more or less clicks under the same radiation, so CPM is great for a relative measurement like these, but not suitable to compare readings between different radiation detectors. Comparisons between meters is done in µSv/hr, but these levels are so low that they don't even move the meter needle enough to read in µSv/hr.

Likewise, these clicks are completely random as you can hear by clicking the levels, and therefore, measured one minute to the next it will vary from 16-24 CPM. These variations are just random variation, not real changes in the radiation levels. If I measured for ten minutes at a time I'd get more stable readings, but I'm going to stand outside counting for ten minutes every day — besides, I moved back to NY back in July 2011 and don't get to La Jolla as often as I used to today in 2014. If the CPM suddenly rose to 100, we'd have something, but that still would be safe.

Think of your pay. You may get paid $10/hr, and after working 2,000 hours in a year, your annual salary adds up to $20,000. Thus, the NY Times and others are looking at the hourly rates of radiation in Japan, and comparing them to annual accumulations of normal background radiation. Japan has a very serious problem, and so far, California is perfectly safe; much safer than the background radiation in most places.

Examples

A year's normal background radiation dose is about 2,600 μSv. It's double that in Denver.

A chest X-ray is about 25 μSv, and an abdominal X-ray is about 50 μSv.

A chest CT scan is about 10,000 μSv, and an abdominal CT scan is about 20,000 μSv, per scan. In other words, enjoying 40 years in La Jolla will get you as much radiation as one CT scan. La Jolla is perfectly safe – today.

By comparison, the levels measured in Japan have peaked as high as 400,000 μSv/hr (400 mSv/hr). In 11 hours at 400 mSv/hr, you'll get a 4,400 mSv dose, or enough to kill you.

See also this chart, whose caveat at the bottom I find particularly relevant.

This is a negligible amount of normal background radiation, and even lower than expected. At these levels, the meter needle is barely coming off "0" and isn't even making it to the lowest part of its scale.

I'm impressed at the low levels. My condo is downwind from General Atomics, who has I-don't-want-to-tell-you-what, and upwind from MCAS Miramar, who has I don't know what, but sure can guess. My condo is 35 miles south of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). It's a testament to America that I live so close to these installations, and there's nothing I can detect. People in Denver get more radiation from the sky.

Just for fun, my neighbor took my SPER Scientific 840007 Radiation Detector on a drive up and down the I-5 past SONGS, and the readings were exactly the same as they read elsewhere. In other words, the plant is so well shielded and operated that there was no more radiation detected than in my own front yard.

In fact, the biggest source of radiation in La Jolla is our granite counter tops. A reading near my kitchen countertops' backsplash read 37 CPM, or double the readings taken outdoors.

My little Radiation Detector draws 22mA from its 9V battery, more if it has to click a lot, which so far, it's not. Let's hope it stays that way.

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